By Pat Sheils, B.S. Health and Human Performance 

Have you ever heard someone say, “Sitting is the new smoking”? It has become such a buzz phrase in the fitness industry that if you have done any small amount of looking around you can find this phrase everywhere. Have you ever wondered why that has come into existence? And have you ever wondered why it is harped on so much? Well that is what we are going to look at today over the course of this blog and also what you can do to help reduce the negative effects of sitting. 

Now, as the title suggests, the answer to all of these questions is going to be the Couch Stretch to help solve all of your needs. The real question is why? Why do you need to do this and why is it going to help you? First, we need to fully understand what happens to you when you sit all day. 

Now, looking at the first issue of sitting all day, we can see that you are sitting with the legs stuck at bent angles for hours and hours in the day. What I mean by this, is that your hips and knees are at roughly 90ish degree angles all day. This causes your muscles to “Shorten up.” This doesn’t mean that they actually get shorter, this means that their range of strength and motion gets shorter. The body is very skilled at adapting to its environment and functioning how it needs to. In this case, your body has adapted to a shorter working range in the muscles that make up your hip flexors. Again, this means that the range at which they work is now shorter, hence the phrase “shortening the muscles”. You can’t actually make your muscles longer or shorter, you just affect the range at which they work. This is why the stretch is going to help to extend the effective working range of your muscles.

I’m sure you’re wondering about some of the other ways that this stretch will help you. The answer lies in your workouts. As we talked before, when the muscles are working in a shorter range of motion, this can affect your efficiency and growth in your workouts. One of the biggest limiters for people during their workouts, especially lower body workouts, is the hips. Too many people don’t have good mobility in their hips and that limits the extension and the flexion that you can get when going through your movements. This limited range can start to reinforce bad posture, leading to increased injury risk and further erosion of strength and performance.The couch stretch can combat this by helping you to increase your range of motion and range of functionality in your hips and quads. As you start to “unlock” these areas in your legs, you will start to notice that it becomes easier for you to sit deeper into your squats. Your lunges will start to feel less awkward. You will run, hike, and bike with improved power and endurance. You will also find it easier to engage your glutes and hamstrings, since you are working to take away some of the dominance through your quads. After all of this happens, you will now be able to workout and function at a higher efficiency and start to see more results from all of the hard work you are putting in. 

To summarize what we talked about:

1. Sitting around has caused your legs to “lock up” and limit your functional range of motion
2. This leads to limits in what you can do in your workouts and also causes issues for your posture through your hips
3. Adding the couch stretch into your daily routine will help to start “unlocking” your hips and quads
4. The benefits for you for doing this are going to be:
   1. Greater range of motion in hips
   2. Greater working range of motion for the quads (good for the knees)
   3. Lower body exercises will become easier for you, leading to greater effectiveness in your workouts
   4. Start correcting lower body posture and relieving any pressure on the back

Video:

Here is a demonstration of the Couch Stretch. This is a great stretch that will allow you to better stretch your quads and hip flexors to help you relieve your anterior pelvic tilt or lower cross syndrome.